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as there are numerous leaked versions floating around the web anyway, i just decided to release the real deal.

link is to the website. i'll update it when newer versions become available :) - and yeah, it's not really a demotool, but i guess kkrunchy is more demotool than all other packers out there with the exception of crinkler :)

this tool has saved our asses more times over the past few years than anything else. and made more extra content possible than anything else. =)
megathumb for the tool, and also for all the help over the last few years with beta versions, info etc :)

I tried this on a couple of my (bloated, horribly oversized) programming projects for my astronomy class, and wow is it a good compressor (granted, even compressed my programs are rather large). The only thing I don't quite understand is what the difference between the two versions is.

A2 (0.23alpha2) is a context mixing based algorithm, akin to PAQ and crinkler (in fact I use the neural network mixer from PAQ7 with some simpler custom models). it's usually faster to pack than variant A, but takes just as long to depack (the algorithm is symmetric). i've spent quite some time (and sacrificed size too) to make average depack time reasonable for 64ks, but it's quite useless for anything much larger.

main reason for the version number strangeness is that both started out as experimental branches that i later deemed good enough to release :) - 0.23final (should I get around to make it) will probably support both variants in the same executable. and expose some other nifty features too.

Ryg - I hear you about the virus thing... MuCruncher went through the same thing, and I had to jump through hoops to get them to remove it. Kaspersky decided that anything comrpessed with Mu was a virus.

ryg: The interesting thing is, I don't recall ANY size difference between the files compressed with a and a2. I would have expected a slight difference given the different algorithms (but then again I know nothing of compression algorithms). I may have to make a more careful study sometime...

deathy, i guess the .exe dropping played a big part in that; for kkrieger at least, after we noticed it is was mainly a matter of writing a few mails. no bitching no nothing, and it got removed on the next update in all cases :)

By the way, Va2 makes a difference of 6kb in our last intro when compared to the kkcrunchy I was using before, and 5 kb when compared to kkcrunchy Va [so, > 16 kb when compared to upx, hehe]. Its also much MUCH faster to compress. Amazing!!

[quote]Instead of releasing the tools, it would have been better to write tutorials for how to make tools of one's own. This would encourage learning and competition. By releasing their tools to the masses, Farbrausch put themselves above the scene and degrade demo sceners to consumers.[quote]

HAVOC!!! Fair play. Hands up, I admit it. I was a bit drunk and had two (acutally four) browser windows up and got a bit confused and one thing lead to another and......

Anyway, I apologise to all concerned, and endorse V2 as a fellow Buzz user myself (when I'm not making a drunken twat out of myself that is!). Have fun, live well, and get hammered before writing post'z - It seems to everyone laugh.

Holy smokes. Up to now I've been using upx with optimized settings, and I just tested out kkrunchy... Saved me an extra 10k (41k vs 51k)!!! 0.o
I also tried it on some old stuff I did, and the improvement is amazing over the other packers I've been using. Guess what I'll be using now, this stuff is absolutely awesome :-)

There is a new version of ANDpakk2, called apk2_v0_18, and it beat kkrunchy's pack ratio on all files, that i tried to pack. Who knew, maybe new version of kkrunchy is out before ASSEMBLY and we get great intros packed with kkrunchy, not apk2.

*: not the released version, but a pre- or post-party version (depending on the production)
i stil use for testing to get meaningful comparisions with previous results.

**: kkrunchy uses a 512byte-aligned file layout that is compatible with windows 9x,
apk2 doesn't; lines marked like this mean that the size with kkrunchy is the size
of the apk2-packed file rounded up to the next 512b boundary. all relevant size
limits are multiples of 512 bytes, so this shouldn't make a difference in practice.

i didn't check whether the apk2'ed exes worked (i know they work with kkrunchy because these are a random sample of my regular test cases). apk2 sizes include the progress bar because it's on by default; feel free to subtract whatever that costs from the apk2 results if you want to, but remember to take the 512b alignment thing into account.

so i guess you'll just have to try both out. i'm pretty happy though that the two have quite similar compression ratios, but kkrunchy (de)packing is consistently faster by a factor of 1.7x or more :)

i've just released the code for disfilter, the x86 code preprocessing filter used by kkrunchy, and IMHO the most interesting part of the whole package (it's certainly the most unique part about it). i've been meaning to do this for quite some time, but the code was badly in need of cleanup and i just never got started on that until last weekend. :)